by James Philip
Several fools in Chelyabinsk – the current seat of the collective leadership of the Party and the State - had tried to mandate a drive south straight across the rocky plateau of central Iraq. Fortunately, Vasily Chuikov had put the fools right before Babadzhanian had got wind of the scheming behind his back. Yes, it would be better to just cross just one mountain range. Yes, crossing the Zagros range was likely to be expensive in terms of men and machinery. But, and it was a big but, since the object of the exercise was to invest and if at all possible, capture Basra and more importantly Abadan Island, both of which lay on the western side of the Zagros Mountains it ought to have been obvious even to the brainless Party apparatchiks in Chelyabinsk that those mountains needed to be crossed at some stage! Had they no understanding of the tenets of blitzkrieg? What did the fools think he meant when he talked about waging a ‘lightning war’ in the preamble to his operational overview? There could be no ‘lighting war’ on the barren wastes of the rocky central plateau of Iran! What if something went wrong? Advancing with the Zagros Mountains to his right and the Alborz Mountains at his back his forces could easily be destroyed in detail by British and American air strikes, or die a death of a thousand tiny cuts inflicted by remnants of the Iranian Army and local guerrillas! How could the people in Chelyabinsk not see that by crossing onto the floodplains of the great rivers of the ancient world – thereby utilising the best available ground for his tanks and the hundreds, thousands of vehicles which carried the ammunition, fuel and food needed to sustain a ‘lightning war’ – and by putting the major topographical obstacles behind the invasion force at the point when it was at its most coherent, freshest and most optimistic, rather than later when it had already been fighting for its life at the end of a dangerously tenuous supply chair for at least a month and probably longer, was not a fundamentally sound military plan?
Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian glanced at his watch again.
04:07 Hours.
Not long now.
In many ways he was privately a little surprised that his plan for the ‘push to the sea’ had survived so remarkably intact. Much of that would have been Chuikov’s doing. He and the Marshal had had their differences over the years and there were still times when the rascally old street fighter treated him like a novice; but they had become a good team in the last year. So much so that they almost, but not quite, trusted each other.
In a few seconds the question of whether he trusted his immediate superior would be academic. He and Vasily Ivanovich had swept up all the chips on the table and staked them on a single outrageous gamble. If they won their bet on fate the Mother Country might yet survive the coming years, international socialism might yet live on in the World and the ‘great game’ would continue. If they lost their wager with fate; most likely they lost everything; and future generations would learn about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a footnote to history and the ‘great game’ would be over.
It very nearly beggared belief that Operation Nakazyvat was about to be unleashed before the Yankees and the British had reacted; incredibly, it was now likely that the West still had no real idea what was about to happen, no inkling that once again ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of human civilization, was once more to be the nexus of history.
The floor trembled beneath Colonel General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s feet, the near derelict building shook and a moment later the concussion of the first salvoes of the intense fifteen minute artillery barrage heralding the opening phase of Operation Nakazyvat filled the night.
Around the map tables men straightened, smiled, and relaxed.
Less than a kilometre away the first salvo of Katyusha multi-barrelled rocket launchers exploded into violent life. Immediately, other launchers began to send their rockets screaming into the night sky. Many of the launchers gathered for Operation Nakazyvat were later model ‘Stalin’s Organs’ from the era of the Great Patriotic War or immediately after the fall of Berlin; but right now the roar of salvo after salvo hurtling from the tubes of the Katyushas sounded like music to Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s ears.
The waiting was over.
Chapter 24
02:49 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
Emergency Command Centre of the Military Governor of Malta, Marsa Creek
Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French, the Acting Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces on the Maltese Archipelago stood up, and watched the Redcaps escorting Rachel Angelika Piotrowska from his presence.
What a remarkable woman!
‘You’ve told me who you are and what happened yesterday in Mdina,’ he had said, after she had dropped the bombshell that Samuel Calleja was still alive in a cell beneath the Citadel at Mdina. ‘But you haven’t really told me very much about who you work for or what you were doing working with Arkady Rykov?’
‘I never worked with or for Arkady Pavlovich Rykov,’ the woman had retorted. ‘Dick White sent me to Istanbul to liquidate him in July 1962. Rykov was responsible, or so we thought at the time, for the torture and murder of several SIS agents in Turkey. I didn’t catch up with him until a few days after the October War. He was in a hospital cot at Incirlik Air Force Base at the time. Semi-conscious, babbling names and places. I made connections and decided not to cut his throat that night. A few days later I was ordered to ‘play him’. Which is more or less what I’ve been doing for most of the last eighteen months.’
‘Dick White?’ He had asked. Like an idiot!
The woman had nodded.
‘He will confirm all of this?’ Dan French had followed up.
‘Maybe,’ she had offered, not really caring either way.
‘The radar and communications of the archipelago were sabotaged in the early hours of yesterday morning? Was that...’
‘No,’ she had shaken her head emphatically. ‘Not Arkady’s work. Like I said I think he knew he was blown when we were sent back to Malta after Dick went through the motions of conducting a de-briefing session in Lisbon in December.’ Rachel Angelika Piotrowska had smiled, she had actually smiled. ‘The sabotage was probably the work of Soviet sleeper agents and specialist demolition operatives landed by submarines in the last few days.’
‘Rykov had no knowledge of the invasion?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. He’d probably have killed me if he had. I was a loose end, you see.’
‘But Rykov and Samuel Calleja took part in the assault on the Headquarters complex at Mdina?’
‘They probably got into the Citadel wearing British uniforms and carrying British papers. I have no idea how they came to be with Admiral Christopher in his office when I arrived on the scene.’
‘Why exactly did you arrive on the scene, Miss Piotrowska?’
‘To kill Arkady Pavlovich Rykov.’
The woman had not elaborated.
‘Am I still under arrest?’ She had inquired.
‘No,’ he had sighed. ‘No, that was all an unfortunate misunderstanding. Things were a little confused in Mdina.’ He had hesitated, contemplated his options. ‘The security people are opening up Fort Ricasoli as a holding centre for captured Russian officers and NCOs. Suspected Maltese and other agents or collaborators are being processed at the Joint Interrogation Centre at Fort Rinella. I won’t have MI6 or the Redcaps behaving like the Gestapo on my watch. Can I rely on you to be my eyes and ears?”
The woman had nodded.
That was a couple of minutes ago and the exhausted Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces on Malta – command of the forces committed to Operation Grantham rested in the hands of Rear-Admiral Nigel Grenville, Sir Julian Christopher’s veteran right hand man throughout Operation Manna, and the victor of the second Battle of Trafalgar off the Spanish coast in December – had made the mistake of allowing his thoughts to wander.
There was a persistent rapping at his half-open door.
Dan French snapped back into the here and now.
&nbs
p; “Come!”
Dan French slumped into his chair and looked up into the flushed face of his Senior Communications Officer, a seasoned Squadron leader of about his own age who was never known to invest much apparent energy, enthusiasm or excitement in anything other than cricket. Normally the dourest of men his eyes positively glittered with anticipation, and oddly, joy...
A smudged signal pad was thrust towards the C-in-C.
“That Turkish destroyer that surrendered to HMS Alliance, sir!” The newcomer exclaimed. He was barely able to contain himself. Dan French was briefly afraid the poor fellow was going to break into a celebratory jig.
With a frown he accepted the pad. These days he needed his reading glasses to cope with small print – his ‘readers’ as he jokingly referred to them, were somewhere under the rubble of his office at RAF Luqa - and in his frustration he shoved it back at his subordinate.
“Just read damned thing please!”
“Oh, right you are, sir.” The other man took a deep breath. “Message reads...”
Dan French waved for him to bypass the standard preamble to all transmissions.
“IMMEDIATE MOST SECRET STOP P417 TO CINC FLEET MALTA COPIED TO FLAG OFFICER SUBMARINES STOP TURKISH D351 CAPTURED WITH FULL SET OF CURRENT CODE BOOKS AND ENCIPHERING EQUIPMENT STOP TURKISH SIGNALS OFFICER AND STAFF COOPERATING FULLY WITH PRIZE CREW STOP ETA MALTA ZERO FOUR ZERO HOURS LOCAL STOP MESSAGE ENDS”
Dan French felt the hairs start to tingle and stand up on the back of his neck.
“P Four-One-Seven?”
“HMS Alliance, sir.”
“Give me that pad!” The Acting C-in-C demanded crisply. “Are there any other copies of this signal on Malta?”
“Er, no, sir.”
“How many of your people saw the plain text version of the original cipher?”
“One man other than myself, sir.”
“Reliable man?”
“Yes, sir.”
The electricity was sparking up and down the Acting Commander-in-Chief’s spine like lightning now. If the captured Turkish destroyer really did possess a full set of code books, encryption procedures and its full electronic ciphering suite, the possibilities were limitless. Even if the enemy changed all his codes and encryption protocols in five minutes time the people at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, and at Langley in Virginia would be able to piece together exactly how the attack on Malta had been, one, made possible, and two, executed in detail. There was no knowing what other priceless enemy intelligence might be wrung from previously intercepted traffic, or how critically important this capture might be in the future.
We might just have won the war!
If that turned out to be the case then the nightmares of the last day might actually have been for something after all. However, the forty-eight year old Second World War Bomber Command pilot whose wife and daughter had been vaporized in the October War would never take anything that mattered, or might matter, on trust ever again. The whole Cuban Missiles Crisis farrago could never have happened if otherwise intelligent, worldly, family men like him had not mistakenly taken it for granted that everybody knew – at some fundamental cognitive level – that nobody could conceivably win a nuclear war. Yet the cataclysm had fallen upon the Northern Hemisphere anyway.
The man who was presently in effect, God, in the Maltese Archipelago hurried tuned his mind to operate in small, sequential steps. First things first was a thing too many alleged military geniuses tended to forget when the going got sticky.
First, maintain secrecy. If the enemy got wind of this cryptographic gold mine which might be priceless – the suspected treasure might turn out to be fool’s gold not the real thing – and the future value of the cache would plummet overnight.
Second, communicate the possible coup to his superiors in England. He would leave it up to them to deal with the Americans; he had enough problems of his own.
Third, safeguard the treasure. Specifically, recover it from the Turkish destroyer and discreetly salt it away in a place of safety pending instructions from the Chiefs of Staff.
Four, worry about one, two and three above before wasting time thinking about all the ways the potential intelligence bonanza would, in an ideal world, be utilised to prosecute the rest of the war.
The phone on his desk rang.
“French,” he intoned briskly.
“The USS Berkeley has now anchored in Kalkara Creek. The Captain of the Berkeley hopes to start the offloading of Talavera’s survivors and wounded within the next few minutes, sir.”
Dan French breathed the latest in an endless stream of sighs of relief.
“How many of Talavera’s people does the Berkeley have onboard?”
“There is no precise head count, sir. All we know is that there are about a hundred survivors of whom some dozen are critically or very seriously injured and some forty to fifty men are less seriously wounded requiring hospitalization or immediate medical attention including all four surviving officers of lieutenant rank or above. All of the latter including Commander Christopher are described as being in effect, ‘walking wounded’, sir.”
HMS Talavera had had a complement of around two hundred and fifty men. A number of her crew members had been left ashore by the speed of her departure from port; the suddenness of this departure had prevented a handful of dockyard workers from disembarking. Nobody actually knew how many men had been onboard the destroyer when she and the frigate Yarmouth had engaged the battle cruiser Yavuz, the fifteen thousand ton Russian cruiser the Admiral Kutuzov, a third cruiser approaching from the north-east and the two big ships’ numerous escorts, each of whom would have – on paper - been a match for either Talavera or the Yarmouth in a straight ship to ship fight.
The figures he had just heard indicated that as many as one hundred and forty of HMS Talavera’s men had perished in the desperate action that members of Dan French’s staff were already calling the ‘Battle of Malta’. HMS Yarmouth’s final butcher’s bill was likely to be lower than Talavera’s numerically but proportionately as high. Yarmouth, the more modern ship had had a smaller crew and had stayed afloat long enough to be run aground in St Paul’s Bay, several miles up the east coast of the main island.
It was a miracle anybody from either ship had come out of the Battle of Malta alive.
“Very good,” Dan French acknowledged, dully. “Please inform me when secure local communications have been established with the USS Berkeley. I wish to personally pass on my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to her commanding officer, and,” he tried to sound formally severe, “and to speak with Commander Christopher.”
He replaced the receiver.
The positions in which the Yavuz, the Admiral Kutuzov and the Talavera had sunk were marked on the maps on his situation table. The notations formed a roughly equilateral triangle some three miles on each side with its nearest co-ordinate, Talavera’s last resting place on the sea bed some nine-and-a-half miles almost due east of the entrance to Marsamxett Anchorage, with the nearest coast being the rocky tip of Tigne Point, Sliema.
Chapter 25
04:17 Hours
USS Berkeley (DDG-15)
Kalkara Creek, Grand Harbour, Malta
Peter Christopher had sent Alan Hannay ahead of him in the boat taking HMS Talavera’s concussed and somewhat delirious former Executive Officer, Miles Weiss and two stretcher cases across the Creek to Royal Naval Hospital Bighi. Poor Miles could not stand up unaided and he hardly knew where he was from one moment to the next.
Atop the cliffs overlooking Kalkara Creek the Doric columns of Royal Naval Hospital Bighi were illuminated in the headlamps of vehicles parked on the cliff edge. Before the First World War a stone shaft had been built at the foot of the cliffs below the hospital to accommodate a bed lift direct from the stone jetty, thus avoiding the need to cart sick and wounded men over the uneven Kalkara roads up to the main hospital. As Peter moved among the men waiting on stretchers on the deck of the American destroyer, lighting cigarette
s and chatting in hushed, comforting tones about nothing in particular as commanding officers have done to reassure their sick and injured men down the ages, his gaze repeatedly strayed to the jetty some thirty or forty yards distant. Arc lights threw a cruel white light across the stretcher parties queuing to load their charges onto the bed lift. Several nurses fussed over their new patients. Occasionally, one or other of the women spared a moment to glance towards the big guided missile destroyer moored to the buoys in the Creek. Maddeningly in the darkness and the glare of the lights no matter how hard he squinted at the faraway figures on the quay he was unable to make out any real details.
He wanted to know, needed to know and to see with his own eyes, that one of the nurses on the shore was Marija.
Thick banks of smoke still fell into the void of the Grand Harbour, roiling down off the fires burning in Valletta, Birgu-Vittoriosa, Senglea and a score of other places. There was the stench of burning bunker oil in that smoke, the grit of pulverised sandstone and the sting of bone dry hardwoods, teak and oak, and of earth reduced to dust.
Peter suddenly became aware that one of the nurses on the jetty had stood up, shielded her eyes from the glare and dazzle of the arc lamps, and was staring at the USS Berkeley.
Peter Christopher gazed across the water, glassy and millpond calm glittering like a mirror now the sound and fury of the previous day was spent and the madness was over at least for now.
He hauled himself to his feet, and hopped and stumbled to the rail where he tottered uncertainly for a second.
A big American seaman took his arm and steadied him.
Peter stared at the woman silhouetted in the glare of the arc lights.
Marija...
He ached to shout her name but he knew she was too far away for his temporarily ruined voice to carry.
So he waved.
And after a momentary delay she waved back.